“What is now apparent to me is that being a
Protestant in Ireland was a help, because it began the process of being an
outsider—which I think all writers have to be—and began the process of trying
to clear the fog away. I didn’t belong to the new post-1923 Catholic society,
and I also didn’t belong to the Irish Ascendancy. I’m a small-town Irish
Protestant, a ‘lace-curtain’ Protestant. Poor Protestants in Ireland are a
sliver of people caught between the past—Georgian Ireland with its great houses
and all the rest of it—and the new, bustling, Catholic state. Without knowing
any of this, without its ever occurring to me, I was able to see things a
little more clearly than I would have if I had belonged to either of those
worlds. When I write about, say, a Catholic commercial traveler, I can almost
feel myself going back to those days—to an observation point. And when I write
about the Ascendancy I am again observing. Elizabeth Bowen writes of her family
employing boys from the local town, Mitchelstown, where I was born, to stand
round the tennis court collecting the balls. I would have been one of those
little Protestant boys, had I been the right age. There was a certain amount of
‘cutawayness’ that has been a help. Certainly it feels like that, looking back
at this very small group of not well-off Irish Protestants. Displaced persons
in a way—which is really very similar to what a writer should be, whether he
likes it or not.”—William Trevor, interviewed by Mira Stout, “The Art of Fiction #108,” The Paris
Review, Spring 1989
William Trevor—born on this date in 1928, in County Cork,
Ireland--has written several novels, but he is probably best known for his
short stories. In his 1986 Atlantic
Monthly review of one of the more famous of these collections, The News From Ireland and Other Stories, novelist John
Fowles called him “the Irish Maupassant”—a writer who can effortlessly evoke
individual lives of melancholy and loss.
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